September 24, 2017

• Texas announced it was ending the use of punitive segregation in its facilities, and will instead rely on other restrictions – like loss of good time, commissary or phone privileges – to deal with bad behavior. The decision will not affect the 4,000 or so people currently held in administrative segregation in the state.

• The Onondaga County Legislature voted to ban the use of youth solitary confinement in all its detention centers and jails. Earlier this summer, the county settled a lawsuit that alleged it relied excessively on the use of solitary for children.

• A man who was wrongfully convinced and spent nine years behind bars is suing the City of Detroit as well as two police officers. Davontae Sanford’s attorney, Bill Goodman, told a local outlet, “[Sanford] spends 9 of them in an adult prison as a 14 year old kid, much of that time in solitary confinement.”

• A North Dakota woman has secured a settlement from a local county and police department after they failed to provide her with the sign language interpreter she needed. After Christine Stein called 911 to report a man who was threatening to kill himself, she was arrested instead, and held in solitary confinement.

• The Colorado Department of Corrections has received $10.6 million from the state to temporarily lease a private prison, in order to address overcrowding within existing facilities. The Centennial Correctional Facility-South, in Cañon City, CO, remains shuttered because it was designed to hold people in solitary confinement; despite requests from the Department of Corrections, the state has declined to renovate the facility, and is instead investigating other approaches to reducing the prison population.